Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling - Obituary

Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling was a defuser of UXBs who emerged victorious
in a five year battle of wits with Hitler’s bombmakers

Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling

6:08PM GMT 18 Nov 2013

Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling, who has died aged 93, had several narrow escapes from death in the course of his work as a bomb disposal officer.

During the Second World War the men of the Royal Engineer Bomb Disposal (BD) Companies risked their lives almost every day, often without ever leaving the shores of Britain. Some 45,000 unexploded enemy bombs (UXBs), as well as 7,000 live anti-aircraft shells and 300,000 beach mines were made safe. In all 394 BD officers and other ranks were killed, and more than 200 were wounded, mostly in the early years of the war when disposal techniques were in their infancy and developed by an often deadly process of trial and error.

On the night of June 13 1943, in addition to the usual high explosive bombs, more than 2,000 German SD 2 anti-personnel bombs fell on Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Known because of the rotating vanes which armed them in flight as “butterfly bombs”, they caused havoc and near panic in Grimsby in particular.

The bombs had never been dropped in such numbers before in Britain and the town’s police force was overwhelmed by the emergency. Wakeling, a section commander serving with 3 Bomb Disposal Company, was drafted in from Nottingham with his section and every available officer and sergeant in the company.

Bombs were found lodged in railway wagons, at sewer junctions, in organ lofts, in the projection-room of a cinema, in chimney stacks and in the ceilings of bedrooms. Others hung from the branches of trees, from gutters or telephone wires and even garden gates. The slightest touch would set them off, and when detonated remotely to render them harmless, there was always the danger that they would set off a “sympathetic” explosion from another one nearby that had not been found.

Second World War bomb disposal poster from one of Eric Wakeling's books

When a bomb was discovered in the open, a circle of sandbags was built around it. After looping one end of a long length of string over the device, the BD men retired to a safe distance and the string was pulled. Where a bomb had fallen inside a house, in an effort to minimise the damage, a pulley and twine system was devised whereby the bomb was drawn across the room and up to the window space before being dropped into a sandpit below. If it had not already exploded, it could then be destroyed.

Wakeling, who was only aged 21, had dealt with a group of five successfully. Then, as he wrote afterwards, “I pulled a bit of string around the sixth. It didn’t go off so I pulled it again and it still didn’t go off.

“I was in a ditch with my driver and he said: 'If you pull it much more, it will be in the ditch with us’. So I went and looked at it. It was ticking. That was the stupidest mistake I ever made. It would have gone off on its own accord if I had left it. It only had a few ounces of explosive, but it [was still deadly].”

Twelve “butterfly bombs” were found in a pea field and marked at the time by poles two feet high. Wakeling wrote afterwards: “By the time we had got round to trying to locate them, the peas had grown to two feet, six inches, and we had a devil of a time finding them.”

During the three months that it took to clear Grimsby of the menace, it brought the town to a virtual standstill. As a result, the incident was hushed up for fear that the Germans would realise how effective the raid had been; in fact, it was never repeated.

The raid formed the basis for a memorable episode of the 1970s TV series Danger UXB starring Anthony Andrews. In 1993 Wakeling received a Civic Award from the town.

Eric Edgar Wakeling was born at Deal, Kent, on August 1 1920. His father managed a food processing factory and Eric was educated at Sir Roger Manwood’s School, Sandwich. He enlisted in the Army in 1936 and served in the Army Apprentices’ College for three years before being commissioned in 1940.

When he joined No 3 Bomb Disposal Company, two of its sections had just returned from Birmingham, where there had been heavy raids. They were leaderless; their officers and sergeants had been killed.

Wakeling was in no doubt that he was a replacement. Officers at first had little training and, as a subaltern and section commander, in the early part of the war life expectancy was about 10 weeks. The odds improved once BD units acquired more experience and better equipment to help them tackle the devices.

It was lonely work. Officers were often working on their own and much of the time there was no way of telling why one of them had been killed and so avoiding fatal mistakes in future. A “Category A” UXB, such as one which had halted production at a tank factory or was buried under the runway of an RAF station, had to be dealt with at once. It might be on a time delay fuse set to go off at any moment. The death of a BD officer in those circumstances was regarded as an acceptable risk.

Wakeling would reconnoitre the site and then the BD squads would work around the clock to dig out the bomb, which might be up to 50ft underground. The slightest vibration — a passing train or breaking up concrete — might re-start a clock or explode a bomb with a sensitive fuse.

On one occasion, working on an unexploded bomb in a brewery, Wakeling had great difficulty in extracting a fuse that he had not encountered before. As soon as it had been removed it was rushed to the Directorate of Bomb Disposals. It turned out that the device was equipped with mercury switches so sensitive that the slightest movement in any direction would explode the bomb – a deliberate attempt to kill any bomb disposal officer unfortunate enough to handle it.

“It was only by the greatest luck that I was still alive,” Wakeling wrote later. “The fuse had a slight manufacturing fault in the system.”

From 1943 minefields which had been sown when Britain was threatened with invasion began to be cleared. This was a hazardous task as few accurate maps had been kept and, as many mines had been placed on beaches, wind and water had often moved them or rendered them unstable. Detecting mines amid shifting shingle was a nerve-shredding task. Wakeling was posted to 14 BD Company which had the job of clearing the Yorkshire coast and was then based at Shoreham, Sussex.

After 14 BD Company was disbanded in 1946 he moved to 12 BD Company at Horsham, Sussex, as second-in-command. He was in the War Office for a spell before being demobilised in 1947.

In civilian life Wakeling worked for Heinz and then for the pharmaceutical and household products firm Johnson & Johnson. In 1951 the Army Emergency Reserve was formed and, the following year, he became adjutant of 142 Regiment.

He commanded it in 1965 and retired from the Army in 1967. He was awarded the Emergency Reserve Decoration. Settled in a village in Buckinghamshire, he was a volunteer driver for the elderly and disabled and for the county’s ambulance service. After his wife died, he moved to Kent. He was regarded latterly as one of the last living links with wartime bomb disposal.

He published several books including The Lonely War (1994); Photographic Story of Bomb Disposal (1995); Danger of UXBs (1996); and A Short History of Bomb Disposal (1998).

Eric Wakeling died on Remembrance Day. He married, in 1945, Nicky Hopper. She predeceased him and he is survived by their two daughters.